Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is "Will the robots take our jobs?" This nightmare scenario comes in several flavors. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call "skill-biased technological change" — people who are technically savvy, mentally flexible and educated will reap greater and greater rewards while everyone else sees their wages decline.
These two scenarios might look different on paper, but the net result is largely the same — a very big portion of humanity would be either be impoverished or reduced to living off of the government dole. Books like "The Wealth of Humans," by economics writer Ryan Avent, explore this frightening possibility.
So far, the robot revolution hasn't happened, or at least not very much — if it had, we'd be seeing faster productivity growth and higher unemployment. A few papers have claimed to see evidence of companies substituting machines for humans more than in the past, but so far the evidence remains scant. The robot revolution is more of a long-term concern, driven by the rapid advances in machine learning and other technologies that seem to allow machines to mimic or even surpass human cognition. If computers can do mental tasks better and machines can do physical tasks better than humans, what special skills do we have left?